offishesandwishes

Of Fishes and Wishes

by Justo González

Right Sharing News

May/June 1987

Vol. XIV, No. 3

Teaching how to fish: a false truism Probably no dictum about
hunger and development is quoted more often than “Give a person a fish and feed
them for a day. Teach them to fish and feed them for a lifetime.”

Yet these words, quoted so often to show our enlightenment, are wrong! They are
not wrong because they are untrue, but because they are not the whole truth.
They oversimplify the causes of hunger and, therefore, make it more difficult
to tackle those causes. We have quoted these words for 30 years, and rather
than show how enlightened we are, they show how little we have sharpened our
analysis.

Where the error lies The dictum implies that people don’t have enough to
eat simply because they don’t know how to fish or how to grow food. While
technologies can improve food production, most fisherfolk know how to fish in
their own waters much better than any outsiders no matter how technologically
informed or how well-meaning. Likewise, traditional cultures know more than we
often acknowledge about their soils, their climate and the diseases that
threaten their crops and livestock.

The
saying ignores a number of factors that cause hunger more often than ignorance
or even lack of tools. Do the fisherfolk have free access to the lake? Is the
lake polluted? Who is polluting it? Who controls the sale of hooks and lines?
Is the lake overfished by industrial interests?

Why we like the truism The line about the fish and
teaching how to fish has been swallowed by so many of us probably because it
makes us feel good. It reinforces our natural ethnocentrism. What we are saying
without realizing it is that we know how Africans ought to farm and that
the problem in Africa is that they don’t know much about proper soil
management. The fact is for thousands of years before the colonial age Africans
were quite able to feed themselves. Barely 150 years after the “enlightened”
Western civilization was introduced into Africa, the continent is suffering
from unprecedented famine. This connection ought to suffice as a warning that
we may not have all the solutions and that we may be part of the problem.

The
fishmaxim may also be popular because
it puts the blame on their ignorance and the hope on our knowledge and
expertise. It makes us innocent bystanders in the plight of the hungry. At most
our guilt lies in knowing something they ought to know and not sharing it with
them. We are not related to their plight as cause is to effect, and we
certainly do not profit from their suffering!

How we profit However, profound and detailed studies show the
connection between the “underdevelopment” of the Third World——really,
“misdevelopment”——and our own development. Let us look at one example:

There is in my city an incredible “Farmers’
Market” that is a huge outlet for produce from all over the world. Tomatoes
cost less than I can grow them in my own backyard. Our city benefits from those
prices. Yet, those tomatoes are imported from Mexico, grown on land that could
otherwise be used to grow food for Mexicans. Therefore, Mexicans who
cross under the bridge are doing nothing more than coming for their own food
that crossed over the bridge legally. We may pass thousands of
immigration bills, but they will not work as long as the legal traffic over the
bridges continues to be one-sided.

What, then, must we do? The
first thing we must do is realize that, more often than not, hunger is a
political problem. “Politics,” in the strictest sense, is the manner in which
humans divide and distribute power and resources. People are not hungry in this
country and elsewhere because they don’t know how to raise food or are lazy.
(Hungry people all over the world work from sunrise to sunset on almost empty
stomachs.) They are hungry because they have no access to power, and,
therefore, no access to food.

We must realize that the only way to combat
hunger permanently is to give hungry people the power to make it impossible for
anyone to take away their sustenance.

We must learn how to trust the
church — unfortunately, this is the weakest link in
the chain. By this I mean the church universal that hungers with the
dispossessed in Ethiopia and with the uprooted in El Salvador. What was
happening in the Philippines was known and decried for over two decades by
Christian leaders all over the world. Yet most church people did not come to
believe it until they saw it in the network news. By then, thousands of
Filipinos had
died as a result of our disbelief! If we are to combat the causes of hunger in
Mozambique, in Korea and in Chile, we have to begin by listening to our
brothers and sisters in those countries who know what hunger is all about.

We must find ways to act on behalf of those who are not allowed the freedom
to act for themselves. We cannot solve their problems for them, but we can
become their advocates so they will have the freedom to search for their own
solutions. Since we are part of the church universal, when we learn of a
situation of injustice and oppression anywhere in the world, South Africa or
Afghanistan, Chile or Arkansas, we must mobilize ourselves to see such a
situation corrected. Some will say that this involves the church in politics.
But if it is true that humans are political beings, the church can not be
involved with the real life without being involved in politics.

To
those starving right now, with no possibility of fishing, we must provide a
fish for the day when they may fish. To those who need hooks and lines, we
should provide them. We must also work to make certain that those who live by
fishing have guaranteed access to the waters by which they live.

This
will not be a popular cause. To give power to the powerless usually draws the
enmity of those who hold them in their power. But Christianity is not being
without enemies, nor is it about being popular. It is about being obedient.